Tinkering is all fun and games, until it’s 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you’re about to execute… And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: “damn, what did I expect to happen?”.

Off the top of my head I remember 2 of those. Both happened a while ago, so I don’t remember all the details, unfortunately.

For the warmup, removing PAM. I was trying to convert my artix install to a regular arch without reinstalling everything. Should be kinda simple: change repos, install systemd, uninstall dinit and it’s units, profit. Yet after doing just that I was left with some PAM errors… So, I Rdd-ed libpam instead of just using --overwrite. Needless to say, I had to search for live usb yet again.

And the one at least I find quite funny. After about a year of using arch I was considering myself a confident enough user, and it so happened that I wanted to install smth that was packaged for debian. A reasonable person would, perhaps, write a pkgbuild that would unpack the .deb and install it’s contents properly along with all the necessary dependencies. But not me, I installed dpkg. The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect… So, I installed glibc from Debian’s repos. After a few seconds my poor PC probably spent staring in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the meatbag behind the keyboard, I was met with a reboot, a kernel panic, and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn’t have one at the time).

Anyways, what are your stories?

  • musicmatze@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    Not really a “braking my linux setup”, but still fun as hell! Back in university, a friend of mine got a new notebook at a time… we spent the night at the university hacking and they wanted to set the notebook up in the evening. They got to the point where they had to setup luks via the cryptsetup CLI. But they got stuck, it just wouldn’t work. They tried for HOURS to debug why cryptsetup didn’t let them setup LUKS on the drive.

    At some point, in the middle of the night (literally something like 2 in the morning) they suddenly JUMPED from their seat and screamed “TYPE UPPERCASE ‘YES’ - FUCK!!!”

    They debugged for about six hours and the conclusion was that cryptsetup asks “If you are sure you want to overwrite, type uppercase ‘yes’”. … and they typed lowercase. For six hours. Literally.

    The room was on the floor, holding their stomach laughing.

  • papertowels@lemmy.one
    1·
    2 years ago

    Not strictly Linux related, but in college I was an IT assistant. One day I was given a stack of drives to run through dariks boot and nuke.

    I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I think midway through, my laptop shut off.

    Guess who picked the wrong drive to wipe with DBAN :)

  • stinerman@midwest.socialEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I’ve literally done the rm -rf / thing. I thought I was in a different subdirectory, but I was in / and did rm -rf .

    When it didn’t return after half a second, I looked at the command again and hit CTRL+C about 20 times in the span of 3 seconds.

    I had to rebuild the install, but luckily didn’t lose anything in /home.

  • krimson@feddit.nl
    1·
    2 years ago

    Many many years ago I wanted to clean up my freshly installed Slackware system by removing old files.

    find / -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {};

    Bad idea.

  • Kanedias@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    Just straight up overwriting boot sector and superblock of my hard drive thinking it’s the USB drive.

    Udev tried to warn me, saying there’s no permission, and I just typed sudo without thinking.

    Then after a second I remembered USB block devices are usually writable by users, but it was too late.

  • halfway_neko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1·
    2 years ago

    Deleted my entire efi partition while trying to install some grub themes.

    And then my backup didn’t work when I tried to restore it.

    I have pretty colours now though, so it was all worth it :)

  • ethanolparty@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    A few years ago I was having obscure audio problems on Ubuntu so I tried replacing pulseaudio with pipewire. I was feeling pretty cocky with using the package manager so I tried

    sudo apt install pipewire

    Installed successfully, realized nothing changed, figured maybe I had to get rid of pulseaudio to make it stick.

    sudo apt remove pulseaudio

    Just two commands. Instant black screen, PC reboots into the terminal interface. No GUI. Rebooting again just brings me back to the terminal.

    I fixed it eventually, but I’m really not very computer literate despite using Linux, so I was sweating bullets for a minute that I might have bricked it irreversibly or something.

  • Doctor MoodMood@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    I had issues with a new version of glibc that prevented me from working on music in Ardour on Manjaro. I then proceeded to force-downgrade glibc (in the hopes of letting me get back to work) and that broke sudo and some other things, which I found out after rebooting. That was an interesting learning experience. Now I snapshot before I do stupid stuff. :]

  • devnull406@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    Connect via ssh to my home server from work

    Using a cli torrent client to download stuff

    Decide I need a VPN.

    Install VPN again from CLI

    Run VPN which disconnects my ssh connection

    Even when I get home, the server is headless so I have to locate a keyboard and mouse before I can fix.

  • Thann@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Accidentally executed a JPEG (on an NTFS partition) and the shell started going crazy. reboot was not successful =[

      • BestBouclettes@jlai.lu
        1·
        2 years ago

        I don’t think it is, if it doesn’t run its course on its own, you’re screwed. It’s Debian so you can recover, but, at least for me, it was painful.